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Google will be splitting its mobile and desktop indexes within ‘months’ to offer better smartphone experiences, according to a Google webmaster trends analyst.

Desktop Google searches could end up slightly out of date compared to those done via smartphones, as the company begins to push mobile search.

Google is fully splitting its search index into two distinct versions: a rapidly updated mobile one, and a separate, secondary search index for the desktop web.

The change will hit within “months”, according to a Google webmaster trends analyst, Gary Illyes, speaking at digital marketing conference Pubcon in Las Vegas, and will leave the desktop version of the index less up to date than the mobile one.

It’s the culmination of a long-running push by Google to encourage webmasters to prioritise mobile-friendly versions of their sites. The search engine already promotes sites that work well on mobile devices over ones that don’t, a change introduced in April 2015. Criteria for that promotion include features such as text size and how easily tappable links are on smartphone touchscreens.

Maintaining a fully separate index would allow Google to expand the push by judging sites with alternate mobile and desktop sites very differently, putting an end to the sort of situation where clicking through from a search result leads to a mobile site that has none of the promised information.

Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land said: “The most substantial change will likely be that by having a mobile index, Google can run its ranking algorithm in a different fashion across ‘pure’ mobile content rather than the current system that extracts data from desktop content to determine mobile rankings.”

It’s not the first time Illyes has mentioned the split, having discussed it at the SMX conference in September last year, but webmasters are taking note of the proposed date for the transition.

Joost de Valk, who runs search optimisation firm Yoast.com, said that the change is “the logical next step” for the search engine.

“It makes sense to me that they’d have two separate indexes and treat them as equals, but now they’ve got a primary one. That makes sense too, because it’s probably the fastest way for them to grow their index,” de Valk said.

“I think in part of it is about pushing people to change their sites to be responsive rather than having a separate desktop and mobile site. By saying that their mobile index is more important, it will push people to focus on their mobile sites.”

In a statement, Google said “[we] are always experimenting with different approaches to keep search index as relevant and useful as possible, but we don’t have any new developments to announce”.

‘Chatbots are the new apps,” said Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella earlier this year. He was not the first senior tech exec to make this claim.

“Threads are the new apps,” suggested Facebook’s head of messaging products David Marcus in January, referring to the threads of conversation in apps such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.

Nadella and Marcus see chatbots – computer programs that you interact with by “chatting”, for example in threads in messaging apps – as an important new human/machine interface. Both of their companies have launched tools to help developers create these bots, and between April and September, more than 30,000 were made for Facebook Messenger alone.

Chatbots aren’t a new technology. The shopping and breaking news bots in Messenger’s ancestors are chatbots such as AI psychotherapist Eliza from the mid-1960s and Parry, a bot mimicking a human with paranoid schizophrenia, in the early 1970s.

(In 1972, they were thrown together for a bot-to-bot conversation, which Parry quickly steered down a rabbit hole of corrupt horse racing gambling.)

I think the developers need to spend a lot more time focusing on the personality and psychology of their botsSince 1991, the chatbot equivalent of the Olympics has been the annual Loebner prize, which challenges bots to converse with responses indistinguishable from a human’s. Questions in 2016 included: “What does Brexit mean?”; “Would you like a cup of tea?”; “What do you know about the Turing test?”; and – a neat touch – “Do you dream of electric sheep?”

But the chatbots on Facebook Messenger and other apps such as Kik, Telegram, Slack and WeChat aren’t dreaming of electric sheep. Rather than trying to pass for human, they’re unashamedly artificial, and focused entirely on providing information and/or completing tasks for the humans they interact with. If they have views on Brexit, they’re not letting on.

Talking to these chatbots works just like messaging a friend, once you’ve added them as a contact. Kik has its own “bot shop” to browse bots in categories including entertainment, lifestyle and games, while business messaging app Slack has a “brilliant bots” list for its corporate users.

Expectations of these bots are high, and immediate. As veteran developer and Twitter hashtag inventor Chris Messina wrote in his blog in January: “2016 will be the year of conversational commerce … you and I will be talking to brands and companies over Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, and elsewhere before year’s end, and will find it normal.”

He added: “I’m less interested in whether a conversational service is provided by a human, bot, or some combination thereof… Over an increasing period of time, computer-driven bots will become more human-feeling, to the point where the user can’t detect the difference, and will interact with either human agent or computer bot in roughly the same interaction paradigm.”

This vision – text chatting to brands and companies as well as to friends and family – is what’s driving the chatbot excitement in 2016.

“I’m excited about conversation as an interface, because for certain applications it feels like the most natural way to engage with a product or service,” says Danny Freed, founder of a startup called Joy whose chatbot helps people to track their moods.

It may also be accessible to a wider range of people. Pete Trainor is director of human-centred design at Nexus, a digital agency that created an AI assistant called Luvo for the bank RBS. He is enthusiastic about chatbots reaching people who may struggle with other digital products.

¨Just in terms of engaging audiences who can´t handle complex user experiences, they´re absolutely brilliant,¨he says. ¨My mum won´t use apps or websites, but she does text message and use Whatsapp to keep in touch because it´s conversational and thus very human by design.¨

A similar argument is made by Nitin Babel, co-founder of Indian startup Niki, whose chatbot can book taxis, pay bills and order takeaway food among other tasks. He points out that in India, less than 2% of its billion-plus mobile users are transacting online, yet there are more than 10 times more users of messaging apps there.

“A similar trend exists globally. Chatbots have the potential to bridge this gap and enable users who are currently on the mobile internet just to converse with their friends and family to start utilising the platform for a much wider range of services,” says Babel.

One of the key services will be customer service. Tony Wright, strategist at marketing and technology agency DigitasLBi, points out that even if chatbots can handle simple interactions between businesses and their customers, they will have an impact. “Waiting hours on the end of a line to give your energy supplier a meter reading could one day be as simple as tapping a few numbers into a tab within Facebook Messenger,” he says.

Jo Allison, consumer behavioural analyst at research firm Canvas8, which has published several reports on chatbots, agrees.

“The potential chatbots have to improve customer service is exciting because it’s very real,” says Allison, who sees the technology as an alternative to the “almost universally unpopular” interactive voice response (IVR) technology used by many companies’ customer service operations now.

Chatbots may be a logical next step, meanwhile, for companies that already have humans talking to customers on social networks such as Twitter – from rail companies to travel firms and consumer goods makers – but who may struggle to deal with an influx of questions and complaints.

Allison cites a recent study suggesting that almost 90% of messages for brands on social networks are ignored, while replies to the other 10% come after an average wait of 10 hours. “Consumers expect a reply within four,” she says.

Joy, which help track peoples moods.

Chatbots, backed by machine-learning technology, will be able to remember past conversations and learn from new ones, building up a stash of data over time to respond to a greater range of incoming queries.

Technology firm IPsoft has built an “AI worker” called Amelia that is designed to automate customer services. Enfield council in London has already struck a deal to use “her” to help residents find information and complete the initial steps in standard applications such as planning permission.

“She determines how to resolve a problem based on knowledge of the topic and process involved,” says IPsoft’s European CEO Frank Lansink. “If Amelia cannot answer a question, she will alert a human colleague, observe the following interaction and learn how to respond to comparable questions in the future.”

While people involved in developing chatbots stress the positive aspects of this, it does raise two concerns. First: the privacy aspects of collecting, analysing and using all this data. Chatbots will need clear privacy policies just like apps do, but will the chatty mode of interaction distract us from that?

“A number of existing bots – and bot platforms – are not designed with user privacy and security in mind,” says Alan Duric, CTO of Skype rival Wire. “Rather than users having to check to make sure that adequate precautions are inbuilt, security is a requirement that should be considered a mandatory part of design.”

Second, there’s the impact on the humans currently working in customer service. In the shorter term, as Lansink’s comments indicate, those “human colleagues” will still be essential. Further out, chatbots are part of the wider discussion about how software may displace humans in the 21st-century workplace.

Some companies see chatbots as helping us get more done in our own jobs. Business messaging service Slack, for example, has its built-in “Slackbot” and a range of bots being developed by third parties.

“Bots are becoming part of our everyday working lives. We see bots scheduling meetings, helping salespeople access CRM information, managing to-dos, reporting on key business metrics and more,” says Slack’s head of developer relations, Amir Shevat.

“There’s a lot of focus on consumer bots right now, but bots that solve issues for work will be where the real success will happen, because there’s a clear set of problems to address.”

This is a time of experimentation for the technology: many of those 30,000-plus Facebook Messenger chatbots are awkward to interact with, spammy and/or not useful at all. It’s hardly surprising at this stage, but it should be a warning against grand claims of a chatbot revolution.

“It got really overhyped really quickly,” admitted David Marcus last week. “This is a long journey, and you have to start somewhere.”

Experts agree that an awareness of chatbots’ weaknesses as well as their strengths is important. Rachel Barton of consulting firm Accenture Strategy, says: “Receiving scripted conversations, being directed to self-service channels or automated help can feel frustrating in particular instances when customers need help and support.

Dylan Bourguignon, CEO and founder of insurance startup So-Sure, says: “My take on chatbots is always: ‘what do customers want?’ My answer to that is: ‘a quick, correct and complete answer to their question’. Until AI is able to do that, humans are the best respondents.”

Pete Trainor says that Nexus spent nearly six months working on the personality of RBS’s Luvo assistant before coding any tech, to minimise the risks of frustration on the part of the humans it chats to. “I think the developers need to spend a lot more time focusing on the personality and psychology of their bots,” he says. “We wanted to ensure the profile was right and the language was approachable. Implementation is relatively straightforward: it’s the words in the chats and the sentiment analysis of the conversations – there’s where the real magic lives.”

Lawrence Wu, developer of a chatbot called Jarvis, which acts as a reminder service for its users, also uses the “magic” word, but suggests that it comes from the combination of bots and humans behind the scenes. “The most exciting thing about chatbots, as a medium, is allowing humans to step in when needed,” he says. “Chatbots in themselves aren’t revolutionary – we’ve had phone trees and robotic dialogues for a while – but when paired with human intelligence for tasks AI hasn’t quite gotten to yet, these bots seem like magic.”

Sometimes the combination of humans and bots can be toxic, as Microsoft found out earlier this year when it launched a chatbot called Tay on Twitter. Designed to mimic the linguistic tics of a late teenage girl and learn from the humans it interacted with, Tay was manipulated by mischievous internet users, and managed to praise Hitler, deny the Holocaust and accuse George W Bush of the 9/11 attacks before being taken offline by Microsoft within a day of launching.

Your energy company’s Facebook Messenger bot is unlikely to be as outrageous, but experts think Tay is a valuable reminder that there is more work to do around AI and chatbots.

“AI-driven programs have huge potential so long as they can get better at understanding language contextually,” says Jo Allison of Canvas8. “And learn to avoid being tricked into promoting genocide.”

Other experts warn of the risks of getting carried away with the chatbot hype. “Not all services can be shoehorned into a chat-based dialogue,” says Tim Rea, CEO of messaging app Palringo, which has a number of bots.

“Sometimes a conversation is just not the best interface suited for the task,” says Lawrence Wu of Jarvis.

“Don’t build a chatbot just to follow a trend; build a chatbot if it helps you solve a problem better, or get to market faster,” adds Joy’s Danny Freed.

Developers are enthusiastic about how the current generation of text-based chatbots will evolve. Voice-based technologies such as Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa – soon to make its UK debut in the Echo speaker – show one path forward.

That said, “it’s important to remember that consumers want less, not more, interaction,” says Daniel Hegarty, CEO of Habito, which has just launched a chatbot mortgage adviser in the UK. “If Alexa can order my shopping while I shout it out across the kitchen, that’s great, but the second it takes longer to say than to type, the utility is destroyed.”

Tony Wright thinks that chatbots will also appear in digital services beyond messaging apps. “It could be interesting to see how chatbots might be built into the likes of Netflix and Spotify,” he says, suggesting that bots could build on the current recommendation features these services have.

“You might want to quickly establish who directed something or what else a particular actor’s been in,” he says, before delivering a warning that chatbots must not be gimmicks.

“The likelihood of a chatbot becoming popular depends on how entertaining or useful it is. Does it really serve a purpose or enhance someone’s experience?” says Wright, before making a comparison that may give Microsoft’s Satya Nadella pause for thought.

“There’s a reason why the personified paperclip in the corner of Microsoft Office isn’t around any more.”

The pick of the chatbots

Tay may have been led astray by humans, but Microsoft has another chatbot that has been less problematic. XiaoIce has been living on Chinese messaging app WeChat since 2015, and has had more than 10bn conversations with people since.

Millions of people are already tracking their calorie intake using smartphone apps. Fitmeal is a chatbot that turns this into a conversation, prompting you to tell it what you’ve eaten and drunk, calculating the calories, and reminding you to check in.

The self-described “world’s first robot lawyer” was created by a 19-year-old student to automate the process of appealing against parking tickets, winning more than 160,000 cases since its launch last year. He has since expanded to flight-delay compensation

This startup wants you to live for ever. Or, at least, live on after your death in chatbot form. It “collects your thoughts, stories and memories, curates them and creates an intelligent avatar that looks like you” to interact with your descendants.

Dance-music star Hardwell’s chatbot is a cut above the marketing-focused herd. It’s as much about fans chatting to him, and voting on their favourite tracks for his podcast as promotion for his music. Two-way interaction.

Indian startup Niki launched in 2015, before the current wave of chatbot hype. It’s an all-purpose helper, booking cabs, paying bills, recharging phone credit and even ordering takeaway from Burger King for its growing number of users.

Messaging apps and their notifications could be seen as a source of stress in our daily lives. Joy wants to have a more positive effect, tracking mental health by asking you once a day how you are and analysing the results, as well as offering stress tips.

Chatbots could be very useful at making up for the flaws in human memory. With Jarvis, for example: you can tell him to remind you to go to the gym, take the bins out or book tickets through Facebook Messenger, and get pinged at the appropriate time with a reminder.

Launched earlier this month, Habito is described as an “artificially intelligent digital mortgage adviser”. It uses multiple-choice questions to gauge your needs, and then scans hundreds of mortgage products to suggest the ones that might suit you – without a hard sell to choose one.

Tina is the work of National Geographic: a Facebook Messenger bot pretending to be a Tyrannosaurus rex that children can ask questions about all things dinosaur. It’s an early example of a chatbot interface used for primary-level education.

Acebot is one of a growing number of chatbots on the Slack messaging service, for workplaces. It will manage your expenses, keep track of your to-do list, quickly poll your colleagues and handle a range of other digital office tasks.

Massively is one of the most interesting attempts to turn chatbots into interactive fiction. Its tech delivers stories through text conversations with their characters, both in its own app and in messaging apps such as Kik.

Killer drones

Remote killing is not new in warfare. Technology has always been driven by military application, including allowing killing to be carried out at distance - prior examples might be the introduction of the longbow by the English at Crecy in 1346, then later the Nazi V1 and V2 rockets.

More recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drones such as the Predator and the Reaper have been used by the US outside of traditional military battlefields.

Since 2009, the official US estimate is that about 2,500 "combatants" have been killed in 473 strikes, along with perhaps more than 100 non-combatants. Critics dispute those figures as being too low.

Back in 2008, Gordon Corera, a security correspondent for the BBC visited the Creech Air Force base in the Nevada desert, where drones are flown from.

During the visit, the British pilots from the RAF deployed their weapons for the first time.

One of the pilots visibly bristled when asked if it ever felt like playing a video game - a question that many ask.

Supporters of drones argue that they are more effective than manned planes because they can usually loiter longer and ensure they strike the right target.

And, of course, there is the understandable desire to reduce risks to pilots, just as in Dallas the police officers could stay protected.

But critics argue that the lack of risk fundamentally changes the nature of operations since it lowers the threshold for lethal force to be used.

Gun bots

Robots have also been deployed on the ground militarily.

South Korea pioneered using robots to guard the demilitarised zone with North Korea. These are equipped with heat and motion detectors as well as weapons.

The advantage, proponents say, is that the robots do not get tired or fall asleep, unlike human sentries.

When the Korean robot senses a potential threat, it notifies a command centre

Crucially though, it still requires a decision by a human to fire.

And this gets back to the crucial point about the Dallas robot. It was still under human control.

The real challenge for the future is not so much the remote-controlled nature of weapons but automation - two concepts often wrongly conflated.

Truly autonomous robotic systems would involve no person taking the decision to shoot a weapon or detonate an explosive.

The next step for the Korean robots may be to teach them to tell friend from foe and then fire themselves.

Futurologists imagine swarms of target-seeking nano-bots being unleashed pre-programmed with laws of warfare and rules of engagement.

There are still questions both about how such machines could be programmed to deal with complex situations and the ethical dilemmas involved when you have to choose whether or not to shoot or make calculations over potential civilian casualties.

There's a parallel here with the challenge about what self-driving cars should do when faced with crashing into a group of children or harming their passengers.

The fears over automation are not new.

One of the earliest use of computers was during the Cold War to automate as far as possible the response to a Soviet nuclear attack.

Dawn of cybersecurity

A system called Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (Sage) was designed using networked computers to help spot incoming Soviet planes.

Soon, missiles were also connected up to the systems to shoot the planes down.

One air force captain queried the fact that computers controlled the launch of such missiles and asked if that was dangerous.

Could someone get inside such a computer system and subvert it to send the missiles back into US cities rather than at Soviet bombers?

That question, over whether automated and remote systems could be subverted, led to some of the earliest work on what we now call cybersecurity.

And there are still risks to remote-controlled as well as fully automated systems.

The military uses encrypted channels to control its ordnance disposal robots, but - as any hacker will tell you - there is almost always a flaw somewhere that a determined opponent can find and exploit.

We have already seen cars being taken control of remotely while people are driving them, and the nightmare of the future might be someone taking control of a robot and sending a weapon in the wrong direction.

The military is at the cutting edge of developing robotics, but domestic policing is also a different context in which greater separation from the community being policed risks compounding problems.

The balance between risks and benefits of robots, remote control and automation remain unclear.

But Dallas suggests that the future may be creeping up on us faster than we can debate it.

Samsung suspends sales of Galaxy Note 7 after smartphones catch fire

Korean manufacturer confirms 35 cases of newly launched devices exploding while being charged and offers exchanges but stops short of full recall.

Samsung has suspended sales of its brand-new top-end Galaxy Note 7smartphone and is offering replacements for anyone who has already purchased one, but has stopped short of a full recall.

Koh Dong-jin, president of Samsung’s mobile business, said on Friday, two weeks after the Note 7’s launch: “We have received several reports of battery explosions on the Note 7... and it has been confirmed that it was a battery cell problem. There was a tiny problem in the manufacturing process so it was very difficult to find out.”

Koh refused to name the supplier of the faulty battery, but said that Note 7s sold in China used batteries from a different supplier and were unaffected. He said that Samsung was working with two or three different battery suppliers for the smartphone, including its own Samsung SDI.

A Samsung spokesperson said: “To date there have been 35 cases that have been reported globally and we are currently conducting a thorough inspection with our suppliers to identify possible affected batteries in the market. However, because our customers’ safety is an absolute priority at Samsung, we have stopped sales of the Galaxy Note 7.

“For customers who already have Galaxy Note 7 devices, we will voluntarily replace their current device with a new one over the coming weeks.”

The Korean company said it expected it would take two weeks to prepare replacement devices of which 2.5m had been manufactured and 1m had been sold. Stock of the phablets has been quarantined in shops and mobile phone networks around the world pending the launch in the UK and other territories which was due to take place today.

Samsung’s advertising campaign, including a high-profile wrap of the Metro newspaper, had to be switched to the company’s popular Galaxy S7 series, which make up the mainstay of the company’s high-end smartphone sales.

Samsung launched the Note 7 at the end of August in some markets, including South Korea and the US. Shipments were delayed in South Korea this week for extra quality control testing after reports that the batteries of some of the jumbo smartphones exploded while they were being charged.

Samsung’s stock plunged by about $7bn over Wednesday and Thursday, barely a week after the phones launched to critical acclaim and the company’s market value reached a record high. The tests follow multiple reports from customers, some posted in online videos and images, of phones that caught fire or exploded while charging. In one video posted earlier this week, a YouTube user named Ariel Gonzalez showed off his phone, its screen charred and partially melted.

“Came home from work, put it to charge for a little bit before I had class,” Gonzalez said. “Went to put it on my waist and it caught fire. Yup. Brand new phone, not even two weeks old. Be careful out there, everyone rocking the new Note 7, might catch fire.”

Others posted photos of Note 7s whose USB-port sides had similarly melted away, destroying the phones. Battery problems are not uncommon in new lines of mobile phones, especially in cases where customers are not using official charging devices.

South Korean school teacher Park Soo-Jung said she rushed to buy the Galaxy Note 7, pre-ordering and then activating it on 19 August, its official launch date. Park, 34, who lives in the port city of Busan, told the Associated Press by email she was bruised when she rushed out of bed after her phone burst into flames, filling her bedroom with smoke smelling of chemicals.

An employee of a Samsung service centre in Busan confirmed that the Galaxy Note 7 caught fire and said the sample was sent to the company’s headquarters. Park said Samsung offered her a full refund and compensation of 300,000 won (£203).

“If the exploded phone in flame was near my head, I would not have been able to write this post,” she said in an online forum on Thursday, where she shared a photo of the her damaged Note 7 and described dousing the burning phone with water.

Citing an unnamed company official, Yonhap said Samsung’s investigation has found that faulty batteries have caused phones to catch fire. It said Samsung estimates that the number of Galaxy Note 7 phones with the faulty battery accounts for “less than 0.1%” of the products in the market. Samsung is discussing how to resolve the issue with Verizon and its other partners, the official told Yonhap.

SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest mobile carrier, said about 400,000 units of the Galaxy Note 7 were estimated to have been sold in South Korea.

Despite the investigation in South Korea, Samsung went ahead with its scheduled launch on Thursday of the Galaxy Note 7 in China. Company officials did not reply to questions about how Samsung determined which phones are deemed safe and which required further testing. It did not say if those phones are different from the ones sold in South Korea.

Yonhap News said five or six explosions were reported by consumers, including Park’s case, citing pictures and reports of severely damaged phones shared in local online communities, social media and YouTube. Other photos and accounts, other than Park’s, could not be immediately verified.

There were no confirmed reports of any injuries.

The Note 7 is a high-profile device for Samsung, but its sales are expected to be a fraction of those garnered by the company’s smaller and cheaper S7 and S7 Edge smartphones.

While the issues with the Note 7 are certainly embarrassing, industry sources say that should the company be able to rectify the issues with the phablet the launch delay and product swap is manageable.

Windows 10: What EXACTLY are the pros and cons of upgrading to Microsoft´s new operating system?

In 2015, tech giant Microsoft introduced its biggest computer software overhaul to date in the form of Windows 10.

The new system is available as a free upgrade to anyone already using Windows 7 orWindows 8 .

While Windows 8, with its tablet-centric design, proved to be one of the firm's least popular updates, Windows 10 launched to glowing praise.

However (and it's a BIG however) Windows 10 will cease to be a free update on 29 July, a year on from its release to the public.

That means if you want it, you're going to have to pay. Windows 10 Home will be available for £99.99, while the Pro option will come with a price tag of £189.99.

For users that haven't yet taken advantage of the free upgrade, we've created the definitive list of pros and cons for Windows 10...

Here's why you should definitely get Windows 10

Cortana

Microsoft's AI assistant is set to rival Apple 's Siri and Google Now, by bringing the same useful functions to the desktop.

A major part of the new Windows 10 software, Cortana has made its way over from Windows Phones and enables users to control selected desktop functions with voice commands. It also features a universal search function that trawls both the web and the device itself.

Microsoft is also launching versions of Cortana for Apple and Android phone users so that they can sync data to a Windows 10 computer.

No Microsoft account needed

Many users were put off by Windows 8's insistence on having a Microsoft account in order to log in. The good news is that Windows 10 has relaxed the rules, so that users can sign in with their existing email address.

Good for gamers

Windows 10 has already proved popular with gamers. Valve, the company behind the Steam PC gaming platform recently announced that 37 per cent of its users now log in using Microsoft's latest software.

What's more, Windows 10 supports the Microsofts's DirectX 12 graphics interface, which is designed to boost gaming speed and reliability, as well as power consumption.

Microsoft is also introducing a range of new games, including Forza Motorsport 6: Apex, which will be free for Windows 10 users.

Virtual desktops

The ability to create virtual desktops is one of Windows 10's neatest features and helps people who have lots of windows open at the same time to keep things organised.

The "Task View" feature allows users to create several different desktops which can be themed towards particular tasks, themes or places of work.

New tablet mode solves the problems of Windows 8

While the much-mocked Windows 8 annoyed people with its inflexible tablet-centric home page, Windows 10 features a separate tablet mode that kicks in when the screen (if you're using a hybrid device) is detached from its keyboard dock (or users can disable it entirely if they choose).

The idea is to create a seamless experience for people using hybrid devices and to placate desktop users.

Here's why you should ignore Windows 10 completely

Updates installed automatically

One substantial change in the new software is Microsoft's decision to allow Windows 10 Home edition to download and install updates automatically.

This may prove to be an annoyance for those who would rather choose which updates to run and when to run them.

The Pro and Enterprise editions of the software will still allow users to postpone installing updates if they wish.

No more Window Media Center

Windows 10 has ditched the Windows Media Center application and the ability to play DVD content on your PC or laptop. Microsoft claims that few users were still using the home cinema hub. However, hardcore fans have put together a bootleg version for those who feel that they're missing out.

Bad for old computers and old software

Microsoft has faced accusations of aggressively pushing Windows 7 and 8 users to upgrade, with some claiming that an automatic update started without their permission.

Older hardware and software that has been designed to run on earlier operating systems won't necessarily work properly if updated to Windows 10.

One woman successfully sued Microsoft for £7,666 after Windows 10 automatically tried and failed to install itself on her Windows 7 computer, leaving it unresponsive and preventing her from working.

Privacy concerns

One reason that Microsoft may be keen to nudge people towards upgrading to Windows 10 is the amount of data that it tries to pry out of new users.

The requests for data can be switched off, but this means that personalised features like Cortana, which rely on getting to know the user's habits, may not work as effectively.

Desktop gadgets ditched

Elsewhere, Windows 10 has done away with Windows 7's desktop gadgets, which might be disappointing if you were a big fan of the bite-sized chunks of info.

Desktop gadgets are small third-party tools that sit on the screen and show current information, such as news headlines.

"Gadgets could be exploited to harm your computer, access your computer's files, show you objectionable content, or change their behaviour at any time," said Microsoft in a statement

"An attacker could even use a gadget to take complete control of your PC."

Imagine a far flung land where you can catch a ride from the Jackie Chan bus stop to a restaurant called Translate Server Error, and enjoy a hearty feast of children sandwiches and wife cake all washed down with some evil water.

If such a rich lunch gets stuck in your gnashers, you'll be pleased to know there are plenty of Methodists on hand to remove your teeth.

And if by this point you've had enough of the bus, fly home in style on a wide-boiled aircraft. But whatever you do, please remember that when you land at the airport, eating the carpet is strictly prohibited.

No, I haven't gone mad. These are all real-world examples of howlers by auto-translation software.

Joking aside, poor translations can have big implications for firms who run the risk of offending customers and losing business, or at least looking very amateurish.

Yet we keep being promised that machine learning and natural language processing will soon make flawless, near-instantaneous translation a reality.

So how long will businesses have to wait?

Obscenities

In January, Skype rolled out its real-time translation software, which allows voice-to-voice translation in seven languages.

But even this hi-tech development was not without its teething problems, randomly turning Mandarin words into obscenities on one occasion.

The glitch was spotted by photographer Tom Carter who was in China shooting a Skype commercial and had been using it to speak to people in Mandarin.

When he said: "It's nice to talk to you" to a local scout in Yangshuo, Skype translated it into a very offensive stream of swear words.

The issue was blamed on how the Great Firewall - China's way of censoring the web - had interrupted the Skype conversation.

Neural networks

Translation programs, such as Google Translate, have traditionally been built around phrase-based statistical machine translation.

This works by analysing a back catalogue of texts that have already been translated - such as academic papers and glossaries. It analyses them in parallel in both their original and target languages, then uses statistical probabilities to select the most appropriate translation.

Its effectiveness depends greatly on the quality of the original language samples and it's prone to mistakes, often sounding clunky and mechanical.

For this reason, Alan Packer, director of engineering language technology at Facebook, said recently that statistical machine translation was reaching "the end of its natural life".

Instead, translation tech is now moving towards artificial neural networks. These are structured similarly to the human brain and use complex algorithms to select and use the appropriate translation.

But rather than just translate the words, a neural network can learn metaphors and the meaning behind the language, allowing it to select a translation that means the same thing to a different culture, rather than a direct literal translation which may in some cases cause offence.

Facebook, which carries out up to two billion translations a day in 40 languages, plans to roll out such a system later this year.

Search giant Google, too - which now offers 103 languages covering 99% of the online population - is also reported to be working on switching its translation service over to neural networks.

But it has not said publicly how soon it plans to make that transition.

'Hard problems'

But before you think auto-translation is on the verge of perfection, think again.

Professor Philipp Koehn, a computer scientist and expert in translation technology at the University of Edinburgh, tells the BBC there is still some way to go.

"There are very hard problems with semantics and knowledge representation that have to be solved first, and that we are not close to solving," he says.

"The main challenges are when there is less explicit information in the source language than what is needed for generating proper target language."

For example, Chinese doesn't have the equivalent use of plurals, verb tenses, or pronouns as in English, which makes exact translation very difficult, he says.

And English doesn't use gendered nouns, which makes things tricky when translating into languages that do, such as French, Italian and German.

Human touch

Until these challenges are overcome, mistranslations are likely to continue, whether that's Chinese bus routes changing Sichuan Normal University Campus Station to The University Jackie Chan Campus Station, or restaurant owners calling their establishments "Translate Server Error".

Although translation technology may be improving rapidly, the cost of failure is potentially huge, so many businesses are unwilling to put their faith in it entirely.

Clem Chambers is chief executive of ADVFN, a global stocks and shares information website that covers over 70 stock exchanges around the globe.

He says: "For us, when it comes to creating geographic and language-targeted websites, nothing beats having native speakers who actually have a thorough understanding of the financial markets.

"Translation tech has come a long way and can provide good literal translations, but what we need is something that really speaks the language of the local end user, with all the subtleties and colloquialisms specific to their country."

In other words, translation tech has its uses, but rely on it entirely at your peril.

It said the AI system was developed to help people get more out of the site and to help catch spam and other unwanted messages.

Deep Text is being tested with Facebook Messenger and to generate responses to certain search queries.

Spam stopper

With Messenger, the system is primed to spot when people are talking about preparing to travel and this can lead to software robots - known as bots - asking if they need to call a cab.

Similarly, if someone writes that they have something to sell, Deep Text-based bots will grab information about what is being sold and its price and suggest the seller uses Facebook's sales tools to make sure the ad reaches a wide audience.

Deep Text has emerged from work Facebook is doing on bots that can automatically help the site's users.

Future work will refine the AI engine's ability to get at the deeper meanings of text so it can spot subtle connections between words such as "bro" and "brother" that are often missed by other language analysis tools, said Facebook.

Rather than be directed by humans, the software has been allowed to learn about human language by itself and has built a conceptual map of how words are used and how they relate to each other.

The greater understanding of text could be useful when applied to lengthy text-based conversations that take place on Facebook to spot relevant or interesting comments.

It will also be used to clean up message threads by weeding out spam or other unwanted replies.

Facebook also said it planned to use Deep Text to improve its understanding of what people like so it can refine the information and adverts they are shown.

Currently, said Facebook, Deep Text can analyse several thousand posts per second and can handle more than 20 languages.

Mike Murphy, writing on the Quartz tech news website, said there were dangers involved in mapping people's interests ever more closely.

"As Facebook gets better at offering us personalised search results from our networks, as useful as those might be, it also keeps us in a more insular version of the web," he wrote.

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